When big corporations make pledges to improve their sourcing practices, it's important to hold them accountable. After all, it's easy to hold a press conference pledging a new green policy; it's not so easy to fulfill the pledge. This was one of the action points in an article in the journal Oryx that I...

They're the bane of urban and suburban areas alike: the vacant, boarded-up K-Marts and Home Depot Expos, squatting like concrete cowpies amidst a landscape of weedy parking lots. But where most people see blight and a waste of space, San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur Gene Fredericks sees opportunity: to...

Net prophet: "There are few things in life more complicated than sorting through the various ethical implications of which fish you should be eating," writes Russ Parsons in this review of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, a hotly awaited new book by Paul Greenberg. "These days it seems like...

This is part 3 of a series on improving market-based seafood sustainability initiatives, inspired by a recent article published by an international team of researchers in "Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation." (See Oryx volume 44, pp. 45-56 doi:10.1017/S0030605309990470. Summaries available from...

This is part 2 of a series on improving market-based seafood sustainability initiatives, inspired by a recent article published by an international team of researchers in "Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation." (See Oryx volume 44, pp. 45-56 doi:10.1017/S0030605309990470. Summaries available from...

February 23, 2010 update: I discovered that the credit for the grasshopper photo was incorrect. The photo is actually from tazintosh's Flickr collection and the photo's Flickr page is here. My apologies to the photographer, who has a great collection of photos in his Flickr collection, including many other...

The products of aquaculture, the farming of sea creatures and plants, are often divided into "bad fish" — piscavores, like salmon, that eat more pounds of protein in the form of other fish than they yield — and "good fish," omnivores like tilapia and carp that can survive on plant matter. A new paper from...

With the Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin stocks plummeting to shockingly low levels, chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa (24 prestigious restaurants around the world) is under pressure from a battalion of critics to remove the fish from his menu until populations are sustainable. So far, Nobu's...

Swimming in controversy: In a world of growing population and shrinking ocean resources, aquaculture is often touted as a necessary tool for food production. And yet many criticize the damage that aquaculture does to wild ecosystems, its use of chemicals, and other unsavory practices. Environmental Health...

One win for aquaculture…some, anyway: Scientists from the Netherlands measured concentrations of several halogenated toxins in tilapia, pangasius, shrimp, salmon, trout, and shrimp that were farmed in several places around the world. Such toxins included Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine...